Letter From the Editors 

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

-T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

At the turn of the season, as the sweet summer harvest turns to early darkness and cold days, we take refuge in our studies and write down those essential details of our days in the sun as if we have a whole life to dictate them. But then, in our comfortable haziness, we seal them up into the many basins of waste and disarray: a locked drawer of our desk, a forgotten manilla folder, or a desolate pile on our bedside table. We take these as the final resting place of those intellectual tubers we fed ourselves with. But, we neglect to notice that art, much like foolish blooms, will spring up even out of waste. 

When we took the reins of Vermilion this year, after a group reading of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet,  we decided the most essential quality of our issue would be generosity with humanity and experience. Generosity indispensably necessitates vulnerability. We tasked ourselves at the magazine with cultivating the hospitality and culture that such a community of artists propagates– a community that rewards earnest giving. 

We asked our community of artists to be vulnerable with us. Allow yourself back to old moments and memories. Let yourself fall onto the page. Give them a chance. Take your memories out of your desks, and now open this our Winter 2024 issue and enter the mundane secret little universes latent in its poems and stories

We want to thank these artists for fashioning a home for their work in our magazine, the staff who took on this season’s new challenge with open hearts, and you, the reader, for allowing this issue to keep you warm during the cold winter months. 

May the paradoxical experience of warm love and seasonal numbness lead you into winter, but not hold you in its quiet grips. Soon we will teeter again on the precipice in madness of our griefs and ecstatic joys, and feel the early springs in the cold soil, as writers do. For now may we wish for each other what Eliot himself wished us at the end of the Wasteland—may we all rest in peace.

Shantih            Shantih            Shantih

David Moretti & Lauren McGinn 

Co-Editors-in-Chief